Thursday Night Open Thread

TV seems like re-runs tonight, so after Survivor, I'm going start watching Season 2 of Breaking Bad which arrived from Netflix.

Keith Olbermann just joined Twitter. He already has 5,200 folllowers. Will he have anything interesting to say? Doesn't seem like his medium, but who knows. If there's something going on you'd like to discuss, here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

my theory about District 9 and Netflix.
A lot of the recent reviews are highly negative "worst movie ever" territory---as was the review I wrote several months ago.
When I wrote my review, it got over 100 "not helpful" tags within 24 hours. This is absurd, because I've never gotten more than 35 "helpful/not helpful" hits, and that was over many months.
I inferred that there was an organized online campaign to help out the movie on Netflix and other sites. Now that it's been out for a while and the Oscars are done with, a more accurate view of the movie emerges. The overall rating is still high, but not as high as before; and there are a LOT more people saying they absolutely hate it.

Ok, so I'm bored. But I was going through reviews on NF because I was just checking out reviews of Shutter Island. I recommend watching Shutter Island, even though I thought it was a failure---it's quite opulently filmed.

the most searing political statement made in a Hollywood movie in years.

its brilliant. its innovative. its awsum.
and honestly before nimrods start calling a brilliant guy like Neil Blomkamp a racist they really really should try reading just a little before coming off sounding like a an idiot.

Warning: For the sake of enjoyment, don't let anybody -- even me -- tell you too much about the strikingly original new movie District 9. You've never seen anything quite like it. Then again, maybe you have.
Have you met anyone who is compassionate and caring--but who drops that warmth like a scalding-hot coffee cup when something sparks his unthinking prejudice? Has an unexpected event ever forced you to see life through the eyes of someone whose feelings -- whose humanity --- you've barely considered? Have you ever marveled at how quickly those who've been unfairly discriminated against can themselves become blindly discriminatory?
If you said "yes" to any of the above, you'll relate to District 9, a gripping sci-fi thriller that is this summer's most political popcorn flick. Not only does it boast secret government agendas, violent cultural clashes and brief, gory vaporizations, it's the perfect movie for an August in which "patriots" demonize and shout down their fellow citizens in the name of freedom.

A critical hit, District 9 promises to be like "The Hangover": a smash whose talented, unknown cast bodes ill for Hollywood stars whose huge salaries no longer guarantee major box office (just ask Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell and Christian Bale). The movie's blend of complex ideas, great visuals and stunning special effects -- all produced on a comparatively miniscule budget and shot mostly in a Jo'burg landfill -- has the Michael Bays of the world quaking.
Even more encouraging: District 9 audiences should leave the theater pondering weightier questions than how many of its stars opted for Botox. In a culture that often prefers its heroes uncomplicated and its bad guys easily distinguishable, characters in District 9 are surprisingly like those in real life.
Every group has its heroes and its jerks -- sometimes existing in the same body.
There are the sadistic soldiers who enjoy abusing the largely helpless visitors. There are heartless government officials whose lies are so reflexive, they've stopped realizing that they're lies. The ostensible hero is Wikus van de Merwe (played by gifted newcomer Sharlto Copley), a clueless bureaucrat whose disgust for the creatures he's relocating is masked by an obsequious grin. Decent enough to protest the creatures' mistreatment, he's also cavalier enough not to mind that the "improved" new community he's pressing them to move to is even worse than their current digs -- "more like a concentration camp."
He's like lots of people: Unmoved by what happens to unfamiliar "others" until a twist of fate forces him to care. Especially unsettling is the portrayal of a group of cruel, greedy Nigerians who set up shop in the alien's camp, selling them goods, buying their weapons, and generally exploiting them. It's no accident that the movie is set in South Africa. Writer-director Neill Blomkamp grew up in Johannesburg during the nation's white minority rule; the blatant racism and authoritarianism of that time and place shaped his creative vision.
"It all had a huge impact on me," Blomkamp, 29, told Chris Lee of the Los Angeles Times. "The white government and the paramilitary police, the oppressive, iron-fisted military environment....
"Those ideas wound up in every pixel in District 9."

If you need to explain at length why a film is not racist, then I'm not the one who's not "getting" it. It's a kind of Trent Lott syndrome.
But live and let live. I didn't want to re-hash the criticism of this most overrated ever movie.
I was talking about NF and about Shutter Island, which really is an interesting failure.

I didn't want to re-hash the criticism of this most overrated ever movie.

then stop trying to misinform people about things about which you obviously know nothing.

I have to quote one more bit from that Politics Daily article to hopefully put your ridiculous racism nonsense to sleep once and for all in which a black journalist talking about another black person says this:

In the movie, black citizens brutalized under apartheid's tyranny don't blink when they tell TV reporters that the aliens -- whose habits and living conditions are indeed repellent -- deserve no rights and should get the hell back to where they came from. Without preaching, District 9 explores the slippery infectiousness of intolerance and every human being's potential venality.
Philippe Bonhomme is a Silver Spring, Md., accountant and music producer who saw an early screening of District 9 and was surprised when the movie invoked for him the struggle for independence in Haiti, his parents' birthplace. One of the Caribbean's most brutal slave colonies, Haiti was for decades ruled by French colonizers who made fortunes from slaves' unpaid labor and agricultural knowledge.
Haiti's famed liberator Toussaint l'Ouverture "was educated, a slave who worked as a carriage driver and joined the Spanish army to abolish slavery," Bonhomme, 24, explained. "The movie's main character came to learn both sides of the struggle between the humans and the aliens, just as Toussaint l'Ouverture was privileged but saw the devastating effects of oppression on his people."

that there were hooked-nosed Jews in the film gouging the poor with high interest usury instead of the Nigerians and you'd see the point.
Not to mention the implicit racism AGAINST South African blacks in the premise of the movie, but I know that's over the heads of the D9 fanboys, too.

since I find this racism thing so offensive I actually looked at every single negative review on rotten tomatoes. all 17 of the 240 reviews.
not one of them is dim or reckless enough to call it racist. not one.

a couple tap dance around it a bit but know better than to do any more than that because they know they would be ridiculed for it.

the rest dont like it for technical or artistic reasons. many were surprisingly positive for negative reviews.

was not the point of my comment. I was observing that there apparently was an attempt to low rate negative reviews so they didn't show up on NF---and the evidence is that there are many more negative reviews showing up now.
The fact I go so many low rates so fast is pretty strong evidence.

Why can't you accept that a great many people that D9 was an abominable film? It IS a matter of taste, after all.
People are not idiots if they don't like the same movies you do. It's rather like your inability to understand that many highly intelligent people think Obama is a horrible President.

I do think D9 is one of the most love it or hate it movies in a while, judging from the reviews.

For the second time this summer, a young, brand-new director has emerged from out of nowhere to present a vision of where sci-fi can go from here. It first happened with Moon, the elegant and tightly sealed thinkpiece from Duncan Jones that operated far more with the head than with the heart. Now, from the complete opposite side, comes District 9, Neill Blomkamp's visceral and thumping debut that, even if it doesn't have quite all its ideas in order, presents a fascinating and effective vision of the future, and of humanity itself.

Variety:

Shot and set in Blomkamp's native South Africa, "District 9″ imagines a present-day scenario in which humans and aliens are forced into an uneasy co-existence and, predictably, bring out the violent worst in each other. As scripted by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, the result reps a remarkably cohesive hybrid of creature feature and satirical mockumentary that elaborates on the helmer's 2005 short "Alive in Jo'burg," borrows plot points from 1988's "Alien Nation" and takes its emotional cues from "E.T."

Hollywood Reporter:

Combining the very best of the postwar sci-fi movies with their trenchant political undertones and pulse-pounding dynamism and contemporary movie technology that can blend aliens seamlessly into a realistic human world of urban and moral decay, "District 9″ flirts with greatness.

This science fiction film from South African-born Canadian Neill Blomkamp, a protege of Peter Jackson, who produced the film, stumbles in a few crucial areas but even so it's a helluva movie. No true fan of science fiction -- or, for that matter, cinema -- can help but thrill to the action, high stakes and suspense built around a very original chase movie.

Emanuel Levy:

"District 9," an innovative and exciting sci-fi-thriller, set against the apartheid struggle in South Africa, announces the arrival an extremely gifted filmmaker, Neill Blomkamp... Inventvely combining the thematic conventions of various genres and the stratgeic approaches of documentary, fiction, and even mockumentary, "District 9" is an original work about political refugees that works on a number of levels, the particular and historical, as well as the more metaphoric or allegorical.

..."District 9," easily one of the best features of this long, boring summer, could become a sleeper, appealing to younger and older demographics due to the effective blend of a thrilling sci-fi with strong political overtones.

In that case it makes sense. But for news except headlines, or any in depth conversation or detailed multi-part answer, doesn't seem effective. If I ventured a guess that it's like an extended bullet point, would I be far off target?

to longer articles on my phone. Easier to check a tweet list than go to all the blogs one by one, assuming I even would have found them on my own. Example, if Greenwald tweets a link to something, I figure it might be worth a read.

and Jeralyn is a defense attorney. How relatively important an issue is to you or anybody else has no bearing on what she can or should write about.

I'm personally not even remotely interested in Roman Polanski, but the complications of his defense strategy are many and varied and raise a bunch of issues that are important to civil liberties and justice, and it's entirely appropriate for a legal blog to give the case a fair amount of attention.

I'm down with Polanski, but is it not an equally interesting legal issue when the President can order the killing (not just the detention or surveillance) of citizens?? I mean, lots of posts about Gitmo, but compared to that, crickets about state ordered murder of citizens??

I don't think you've been keeping up here. That said, if you want to talk about it, feel free on the open threads. Just don't try to badger the blog owners to address your interests above their own.

And really, this business of counting up posts and railing when the proportion of posts doesn't correspond to someone's idea of their relative importance is tedious, old, and frankly pretty juvenile. If you want to do lots of posts on the subject, start your own blog. But harranguing blog owners about what they "should" be writing about is wasted bandwidth.

After one has said that the president giving himself authority to assassinate people is horrible, what more is there to be said about it? There's very little difference of opinion about it on this site, and not much nuance to such a policy, so what's to discuss?

What's the "issue"? We all agree, pretty much, so it'd just be preaching to the choir. It's not controversial in that sense anyway.

Sorry if I overreacted to your "nudge." It just became such a commonplace to have indigant commenters demanding to know why a blogger doesn't post more about this or that favorite issue on other blogs, and this blog has been largely free of that.

It's a little bit like the right wing excoriating Democrats for not denouncing terrorism.

that we all agree. That's worth a post or two right there! And, its Friday, so a bit of a celebration too?

The logic of -it is not controversial and so it is not worth blogging about- somehow doesn't feel right. One reason I like this site so much is exactly that not everyone agrees. Site administrators allow this. This means politically diverse commenters must "co-blogitate" and since mere name calling is discouraged, then some interesting debate can occur.

First, killing a single individual, even the cheif architect of the Pearl Harbor invasion, was viewed by a great many in the War Department and the military hierarchy as assassination. The decision was ultimately made, over objections, after significant and serious debate.

Second, depending on how the attack occurred, there was fear that the Japanese Navy would figure out just how compromised their codes were.e range exceeded by far th

Minor reason? range from Allied bases. The range by far exceeded the maximum range of even the P-38 fighters that ultimately completed the mission. It took Charles Lindburgh personally visiting, working with the pilots and working on the aircraft to extend the range for the mission to not be a suicide mission. There are even rumors tht Colonel Lindburgh was flying one of the P-38s. He was an incredible engineer, even though he was not called to active duty for WWII. is conolelcy was on the retired list.

OK, I see Jeralyn did write about this twice and I was interested to read comments in the open thread. MT had one that was interesting about government offing people anyway and now it is just out in the open (very very interpreted and shortened - if I've misread you I'm very sorry). But I would disagree. When killing citizens is open then what is going to prevent a more horrible president from killing people who may just be dissenters? I guess it is a slippery slope argument. I'm not sure I like the slope. For all you Hillary supporters, she must have known about the policy and did not object. Ah, these dems.....

I guess, to some people. Problem is, Obama is the POTUS, and the decision is his, not hers, and 2) claiming she "must have known about the policy and did not object" is a little different than "wonder(ing) just where all this policy comes from".

hawk. Obama was, and is a hawk too. It was her most conservative position and I wish she was now Health and Human Services rather than SOS. But in this discussion I wonder how relevant she is. I suppose this policy must have been passed by her.

There was no difference in the campaign between the warmongering of Hillary and Obama.

The only illusion of difference was that Obama was against the Iraq war before he became a Senator. Had he been in the Senate for the AUMF vote, I am certain that he would have voted the same as Hillary.

Why? Because their senate votes were almost identical. Mainstream warmongering Dems, slightly less warmongering than the Neocons.

Why? Because Americans were just as warmongering and wanted Muslim blood, their reps were simply voting their wishes...

Probably the same kinds of people Johnson was listening to when we were torturing and assassinating people in Vietnam, ie, Operation Phoenix ; the kinds of people Carter listened to when we promoting the same in parts of Latin America; the kinds of people Clinton listened to when he supported extraordinary rendition..

that we have a longstanding tradition of Dems who have been fairly progressive at home while at the same time being militantly interventionist abroad - either directly or by proxy - and that when seen in that context, what Obama is doing now is no great deviation from earlier precedents -- even if what this country requires IS a major deviation from earlier precedents.

Good topic to bring up. Is your main reason for wondering why it wasn't being talked about it enough here (in your opinion) some sort of suspicion that Hillary is behind it and her supporters are ignoring it? Or that Obama supporters are ignoring it? Or maybe that KO haters are ignoring it?

I'll admit that anything that KO brings up is not going to be on my radar. But I have read a lot about this since I don't expect Jeralyn to give me ALL my information. And yeah, I hate it the policy no matter who advocated it.

yes, yes, and yes. I also never watch KO - or any TV news personality. But I do read Glenn Greenwald rather often.

He quotes Adam Serwer: "From a civil libertarian point of view, we're in a much worse place than we were during the Bush administration, when Democrats were willing to oppose Bush's expansive claims of executive authority. Now we have only muted criticism from Democratic legislators and hysterical cries from Republicans that Obama isn't going far enough."

So we are willing to say to teapartiers "where were you during Bush" and ignore where dems are during Obama?

Dems were able to have a vocal opposition to Bush (IMO it was not vocal enough but we were there) but now dem denial of due process is AOK.

Maybe its not fair, but I thought this would be covered more on TL which is perfect for this kind of subject. TL has been great, and made a mark, on gitmo coverage, and this seems as important. I can only conclude it is being ignored for some reason.

It was me who posted this Glenn Greenwald article in Wednesday's Open Thread (#120) because I believed it would be of interest to everyone.

I never expected the type of comments that then rained down on me in response. Comments that have to be seen in order to be believed. It was a coincidence that I saw them and I almost wish I hadn't seen them. Because

Consequently, I learned more about the blog than I ever wanted to know ...

But Thanks again to the one blogger who took it upon himself/herself to correct the wrong interpretations of my initial post and then had to defend himself/herself for doing so.

The Monster Engine is a book, a demonstration, lecture and a gallery exhibition. The premise for all three came from one single question: What would a child's drawing look like if it were painted realistically?

What might have been quirky, vital drawings by children end up looking like too many of the animated films we've been seeing for the last fifteen years.

I'm no Luddite, so even though I still do the same old-school animation I've done for years (drawing on cels, painting on glass, etc.), I do make use of digital processes when the need arises, and I greatly admire some of the digital animation and other digital artwork I've seen. But these pictures just look embalmed to me.

Who knows, maybe the same process in the hands of a different artist would produce something more interesting.

I remember a Canadian animator back in the 70s who took children's drawings and animated them, which meant that a train with wheels higher on one side than the other would make its lopsided way down the track, etc. That was funny and charming and actually enhanced the children's drawings rather than embalming them.

that it's not about trains--just wanted to draw that contrast between something that works and something that (IMO, of course) does not. I too like the idea of this project, if not these particular results.